‘Retirement Plan Adviser Team of the Year’ Forms New Company
The Indianapolis
retirement plan and institutional investment advisers, formerly known as
The Prince Group, have established Praxis Fiduciary Advisors LLC.
Doug Prince, Deana Harmon and Brea Dantin lead the team,
which includes Jeff Prince, Aaron Tomlin and Laura Mongon. Their experience
with retirement plans has helped them develop tools to apply theory to practice
as they assist clients in executing their fiduciary responsibilities.
The team won PLANSPONSOR magazine’s “Retirement Plan
Adviser Team of the Year” award in 2010. (See “Retirement Plan
Adviser Team of the Year: The Prince Group, Stifel Nicolaus.”) The team has provided testimony and written statements
to the Department of Labor’s Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA)
Advisory Council. The group was also named one of the top 100 retirement plan
advisory groups in the country by PLANADVISER
magazine.
According to a report from the National Institute on
Retirement Security (NIRS), rates of poverty among older households (ages
60-plus) lacking defined benefit (DB) pension income were approximately nine
times greater than the rates among older households with DB pension income in
2010, six times greater than in 2006.
Older households with lifetime pension income are far less
likely to experience food, shelter and health care hardship, and are less
reliant on public assistance, according to the report titled “The Pension
Factor 2012: Assessing the Role of Defined Benefit Plans in Reducing Elder
Economic Hardships.” The data also indicated that pensions are a factor in
preventing middle-class Americans from slipping into poverty during retirement.
“[Pension income keeps] middle-class families in the middle
class when they retire,” said Diane Oakley, executive director at NIRS and
co-author of the report, during a webinar about the data.
In addition, older households with DB income generally fared
better during the recent economic turmoil than households without it. “The
power of the DB plan actually became even stronger in the financial crisis,”
Oakley said.
The report estimates that in 2010, DB pension receipt among
older American households was associated with:
4.7
million fewer poor and near-poor households;
460,000
fewer households that experienced a food insecurity hardship;
500,000
fewer households that experienced a shelter hardship;
510,000
fewer households that experienced a health care hardship; and
1.22
million fewer households receiving means-tested public assistance.
(Cont...)
The study also found that gender and
race gaps in poverty shrunk among those with pensions. Only 2% of females with
pension income were considered poor, compared with 18.4% without pensions. This
was compared with 1.3% of men with pensions who were considered poor and 11.7%
without pensions.
In regard to race gaps, 1.5% of
white older Americans with pension income were classified as poor, and 12.4%
were considered poor without them. The older black population saw 2.9%
classified as poor with pensions, compared with 26.9% considered poor without
them. The Hispanic population also had a large gap in poverty levels between
those with pensions (2.2%) and those without (25.4%).
“The analysis indicates pensions
exert an independent, positive impact on older Americans’ well-being—an effect
we call the ‘pension factor,’” said Frank Porell, professor of gerontology at
University of Massachusetts Boston and co-author of the report. “This ‘pension
factor’ is particularly strong for more vulnerable subpopulations of elder
households. In fact, gender and racial disparities in poverty rates, material
hardships and public assistance rates are greatly diminished, and in some cases
nearly disappear, among households receiving pension income.”
The report was conducted using the
U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Income Program Participation (SIPP) panels. The
study sample included SIPP respondents ages 60 or older and all households with
a head of household ages 60 and older.